Will BBC chief's head roll over the Queen's tiara saga?

Peter Fincham told a press launch on Wednesday the Queen had been filmed "losing it a bit" and "walking off in a huff" from a photo shoot when asked to remove her tiara.

That afternoon Buckingham Palace made furious calls to tell the BBC the footage was wrong.

However, Mr Fincham failed to stop a trailer of the footage, which had been wrongly edited, being shown on news programmes and reported in newspapers.

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It was not until noon the next day that the BBC apologised or tried to stop the material being used.

Mr Fincham's fate will be decided at a meeting between the BBC Trust and the director general Mark Thompson on Wednesday. He has said he will not resign.

The Queen had been sitting for a portrait with American photographer Annie Leibovitz when the material was filmed for the documentary A Year With The Queen.

But the footage of her supposedly stormy exit after Miss Leibovitz asked her to remove her tiara was in fact filmed as she arrived for the session.

On Thursday, the BBC finally issued an apology to the Queen and Miss Leibovitz. It put out a statement with

RDF media, the production company responsible for filming the royal documentary.

The organisations tried to clarify how the two scenes in the sequence were "edited in the wrong order".

The BBC said the extracts, supplied by RDF which had made an "early assembly" of the footage several months ago, was never intended to be seen by the press or public.

It claimed it was given "in error" to the BBC personnel preparing the channel's autumn launch tape.

BBC bosses said RDF did not have an opportunity to review the launch tape and that Mr Fincham used the sequence in "good faith without any knowledge that the error had been made".

Miss Leibovitz had actually mentioned the true sequence of events several weeks ago in the June issue of Vanity Fair.

It was as the Queen arrived rather than left that her irritation was most apparent, she said.

"She entered the room at a surprisingly fast pace - as fast as the regalia would allow her - and muttered, 'Why am I wearing these heavy robes in the middle of the day?', she recalled.

Some senior BBC staff and politicians have called on Mr Fincham, who earns £250,000 a year, to resign.

There is incredulity within the corporation that the footage was not properly checked before being put out to journalists.

On Thursday he met with BBC Vision director Jana Bennett and two executives from RDF, which is also behind shows such as Wife Swap and Faking It.

Yesterday he apologised but stressed that the footage was not shown to the public - although it did end up on numerous news programmes. "If Mark Thompson wants me to resign, I will, of course, do so.

"As a matter of fact, Mark Thompson has sent me a message of support in this, that he doesn't want me to resign.

"But I quite understand that people feel strongly about this - this is something that involves the Queen."

He blamed an "outside company" for providing the edited footage and said he was "not happy" about the situation.

The BBC had not apologised more quickly because it wanted to make sure it had all of its facts about how the mistake had happened, he added. The Queen would not be "misrepresented" in the finished version of the show.

Mr Thompson yesterday urged BBC staff to report any further "lapses", providing an email link for whistleblowers to write in to.

Dame Helen Mirren, who won an Oscar for her portrayal of the Queen this year, also weighed into the row.

"The BBC should have known better. I think it was a disgrace. How idiotic really," she told Sir David Frost on satellite TV station Al Jazeera English.

Palace sources are said to be pointing the finger at the BBC, not RDF Media.

A royal insider said: "The Queen's office is understandably angry about what has happened.

"Regardless of whose fault it turns out to be, the BBC's misrepresentation of her alleged behaviour has been crass and grossly unfair."